Clients & Work

Finz Lite

Overview

The original software (built by another firm), including all of the base class libraries and such, was nearly 50,000 lines of code, taking many months to develop and costing many thousands of dollars. While feature rich, it was slow with page times sometimes taking 30 seconds or more, and bugs could not be fixed at reasonable rates when the developer ceased operations.

HaveAByte was asked to resolve the situation. We re-wrote the software in about a week, utilizing existing HTML. We took the time to evaluate the actual traffic and business, to decide on a minimum set of features. Only critical functions were retained. The new code is in Perl and is around 100 lines of code, as well as recycled HTML/CSS. The previous site has a complex relational database – while we love building those, it was completely scrapped for the rebuild. After another week or so of testing and shakeout, the site was launched. The pages load instantly, no lag whatsoever.

The cost of the rebuild was nearly less than the cost of one or two troubleshooting incidents with a ColdFusion consultant, many more of which were needed to keep the system functioning and fix the various bugs.

It is a great example of avoiding over-development, working quickly, with as little cost to the customer as possible.